SACS Cable to boost connectivity in Africa via Teraco Data Centres

Teraco, Africa’s largest vendor neutral colocation data centre provider has said that clients currently making use of its data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg are set to benefit from the cross connection to the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) – Africa’s first transatlantic link connecting Africa to the Americas.

Owned by Angola Cables, the new subsea network provides the most direct routing for internet traffic across the Atlantic and according to Teraco, will bring immense opportunity for clients within the data centre.

“This is an exciting development and includes much needed investment into local infrastructure. Built with a direct purpose to boost business in South Africa, SACS will provide improved connectivity and significantly lower latency routing between Africa and the Americas,” says Jan Hnizdo, Teraco Managing Director.

Jan Hnizdo

Offering five times the speed of existing cable routings and an improvement of up to 60%, SACS reduces latency from Fortaleza (Brazil) to Luanda (Angola) from 350ms to 63ms; Luanda is connected with the some latency to London and to Miami of approximately 128 milliseconds, the link from Miami to Cape Town has been reduced to 163ms – from 338ms in the past prior to SACS.

When asked about the main benefits of the system, Angola Cables’ CEO, Antonio Nunes said that latency is a global issue, especially in the era of software driven services. “SACS has the capabilities to dramatically improve this – and at the same time Angola Cables is bringing new routes to Africa with a lot of available capacity.”

The Angola Cables submarine network is already providing Teraco’s data centres in South Africa with direct connectivity to Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, but also to Miami giving Teraco’s DC clients a premium opportunity to connect and share digital content with the America continent.

Hnizdo added that SACS will be a great contributor to increased economic growth as this new system compliments the European route: “Having a southern-based cabling system is also good as a contingency plan. SACS provides not only an alternative, but a cost effective option to access regions that were previously difficult to reach.”

“As Teraco grows its market presence across carrier, content, cloud and enterprise sectors, our clients will benefit from the latency and diversity offered by the subsea cable systems now available. Access to the Americas has never been easier and we look forward to an increase in transatlantic traffic fully utilising the SACS cable system that is built on 100Gig technology.”